• So you went and vacuum-cleaned all the cricket rights around the world.

That was the starting point.

• For how much money?

I think the Indian board contract in 1994 was done for $12 million for a five-year deal, which is a lot of money.

• About Rs 47 crore today.

But in those days, the dollar was around Rs 30, so it was about Rs 35-36 crore for a five-year term. That itself, to the Indian board, was a very large sum of money.

• So this has grown more than 250 times.

Absolutely, without doubt. Then we went about mapping the entire country to find out the cable operators, where they lived, how many subscribers they had.

• And you may have known a little bit about distribution from your cigarette business.

That's exactly what we did. We learnt from the cigarette business. We in fact used the cycle salesmen who actually delivered cigarettes daily. We told them to map out where the antennae are coming from, who the cable operator is, get his address, get his phone number, find out how many subscribers he has. That took us about a year and a half, but we were able to map pretty much the whole country. That gave us a base to go forward and look at launching a pay channel when everyone said it'd never happen.

• Things went up and down.

Actually, the first test was when India was visiting England. That's when we encrypted the signal. We launched in October, but in June, the following year, we switched the signal off and said you now have to pay for the signal. Our offices were stoned, a lot of our staff was beaten up. Slowly but surely, after that, operators realised we were serious. They started to pay; the cartelisation broke up. The pay channel business began that day.

... contd.